the king of grunge (DMX, RIP)

"...As superthugs go, DMX is the most interesting, because he doesn't glamorize the gangsta lifestyle. Produced by Ruff Ryders chief soundboy Swizz Beatz, "One More Road To Cross" has the accursed, burdened heft of Blacks Sabbath and Flag--a perfect fit for DMX's stoic description of a carefully planned liquor store heist that goes bloodily wrong. "The Professional" is a bleak glimpse into the mind of a hired assassin ("Shit ain't go too well/THAT'S MY LIFE/Know I'm going to hell/THAT'S MY LIFE") while the betrayal-and-retribution themed "Here We Go Again" starts with the insuperably fatigued murmur "Same old shit, dog/Just a different day". This vision of thug life as agony, repetition, and endurance is communicated as much through DMX's hoarse rasping timbre (pure Ozzy/Rollins) and his flow (alternating between pay-close-attention-this-is-hard-earned-knowledge-I'm-sharing slow to rapid-fire blurts like he's got too much pain to cram into the rhyme-scheme's stanzas.)"

[from a review of  And Then There Was X alongside records by Jay-Z, The Lox, Juvenile)

WE ARE FAMILY: the Rise of the Rap Clans and the Hip Hop Dynasty

director's cut, New York Times, March 12 2000

by Simon Reynolds

 

When rapper DMX accepted a trophy at the Billboard Music Awards last year, he took the stage flanked by a squad of fellow artists from the Ruff Ryders label. It's hard to imagine anyone in rock doing this---Trent Reznor, say, menacingly surrounded  by the roster of his label Nothing. But in hip hop, such shows of collective strength are growing more common, as  rap labels increasingly style themselves as families. Like the mafia families whose Hollywood mythology has so influenced gangsta rap,  these labels compete to dominate the lucrative hip hop market, and in this symbolic war of clan against clan, loyalty is exalted as the supreme value.

 The two biggest forces in contemporary rap, the Yonkers-based Ruff Ryders and the New Orleans label Cash Money, both ferociously project a sense of clan identity, through logo-based regalia and unity-themed songs and album titles such as "I'm A Ruff Ryder", "Ruff Ryder's Anthem", Eve's Ruff Ryders's First Lady, and  "Cash Money Is an Army". Cash Money also has a supergroup, Hot Boys, composed of the label's biggest solo stars---Juvenile, B.G., and Lil Wayne.  As it happens, both labels are literally family businesses: Ruff Ryders was started by the brothers-and-sister team of Darrin, Joaquin and Chivon Dean, while Cash Money was founded by brothers Ron and Brian Williams. As if in recognition of their similar ethos, the two labels have joined forces for a massive rap tour currently crossing the USA.

 Although crews, cliques and posses have always been part of hip hop lore, rap's dominant lyrical mode has hitherto been first person singular.  But in the last year or so, ego has been eclipsed by what you might call "wego," the collective triumphalism of Ruff Ryders's "We In Here" or Hot Boys's "We On Fire". In the wake of Cash Money and Ruff Ryders's success, other labels are presenting themselves as families or Cosa Nostra-style syndicates. "You Are About To Witness A Dynasty Like No Other" proclaims the sticker on Jay-Z's new album, referring to his Roc-A-Fella label's proteges Beanie Siegel, Memphis Bleek, and Amil, while Murder Inc. has combined its roster into the Hot Boys-style supergroup The Murderers.

The idea of the rap group as a blood-brotherhood was pioneered in the mid-Nineties by the Wu-Tang Clan, the ten-strong band of MCs centered around producer the RZA. While the lyrics and cover art self-mythologized the group as warrior priests wielding arcane knowledge and encrypted language as weapons against power, the Wu-Tang Clan simultaneously operated as a shrewd entertainment corporation, signing its members to solo deals with different record companies and diversifying into all manner of Wu-branded merchandizing offshoots: clothing, a comic book, a website, the video-game Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style.  So iconic was the Clan's logo at the group's 1997 height of prestige and popularity that rap paper The Source could feel secure about using it as their cover image, rather than a recognizable celebrity face.

Wu-Tang's branding strategy was taken further still by Master P.'s label  No Limit, whose assembly-line turnover of releases all have  instantly recognisable cover art (garishly hyper-real "ghetto fabulous" tableaux created by design team Pen & Pixel) to match the identikit  New Orleans gangsta sound of the records.  Ironically, the Pen & Pixel look has been appropriated by countless second-division hardcore rap labels, hoping to get accidental sales from fans picking up unheard what they assume is a debut from the latest recruit to the "No Limit army". Master P. also goes in for diversification in a big way, building a business empire reputedly worth $361 million through No Limits toys, clothing, and a series of inexpensively made straight-to-video movies.

Influenced by Master P.'s acumen, Cash Money and Ruff Ryders have their own movies in production. And both labels have imitated No Limit's strategy of market saturation and hitting while you're hot. DMX has released three albums in barely more than eighteen months, and the first two months of 2000 has seen a flurry of Ruff Ryders debuts from The Lox and Drag-On, with a new Swizz Beatz compilation and Lox-man Jadakiss's own solo album soon to follow.

 Ruff Ryders and Cash Money have built their empires using techniques that are now a predictable procedures in the rap business. Reinforcing the all-for-one, one-for-all clan image, rappers from the same roster guest on each other's tracks; new artists are introduced to the public through cameo appearances in the single/video by the label's established stars. Cash Money have taken this twin strategy of cross-promotion and artist-development to the furthest extreme. Other rap artists will feature R&B singers or big-name rappers from other labels on their tracks in order to add more-stars-for-your-money sales appeal. But Cash Money's tracks never feature outsiders---the "guests" are always only other Cash Money artists.

 Still, it would be incorrect to suggest that hip hop's family values are just an ideological gloss for business realpolitik. The family is basically a microcosm of socialism, based around the same ideals like sharing, altruism, and self-sacrifice for the greater good.   Effectively, the rap clan works an  enclave of collectivism within capitalism's rapacious cut-throat competition, and as such it offers solace  and security in what would otherwise be a desolate moral and emotional void. Ruff Ryders's catchphrase  "Ryde or die" divides the world into a starkly opposed them and us: people you'd kill versus people you'd kill for/die for/ride into battle alongside. Taken from a "blacksploitation"-era cowboy movie, the name Ruff Ryders recalls the going-out-in-a-blaze-of-glory romanticism of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch.

Lyrically, DMX avoids two of gangsta rap's staples---flaunting wealth and abusing women-- to focus almost exclusively on loyalty, betrayal, and retribution. His yearning for a surrogate family is expressed through an obsession with dogs strikingly different from the incorrigibly lecherous canine persona adopted by George Clinton circa "Atomic Dog". DMX's use of the term "dog" to refer to himself and his clique stems from admiration for the way wild dogs run in packs and domesticated dogs give their owner's unconditional love. In song after song, DMX insists "I will die for my dogs". He imagines this canine fraternity becoming a kind of pedigreed dynasty: "My dogs, the beginning of this bloodline of mine".

DMX's doom-and-gloomy imagery--album titles like It's Dark and Hell Is Hot, songs like "The Omen"-- has as much in common with angst-wracked industrial and heavy metal artists such as Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and Korn as with other rappers. A crucial aspect of his Gothic imagery is what the philosopher Michel Foucault called "the Medieval symbolics of blood", as seen in the title of DMX's second album Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood. Thicker than water but easily spilled,  "blood"  is a highly charged word in DMX's  vocabulary. Its  ambivalence condenses gangsta rap's violently polarized emotions, the way it's forever oscillating between love and hate, loyalty and skullduggery, unity and dog-eat-dog struggle.

Gangsta rappers have found a reflection of these hot-blooded passions in Hollywood's Mafia films, whose families disregard the broader society's morality and instead cleave to a privatized morality: a neo-Medieval ethics of loyalty and revenge that operates only in the domain of  kith and kin, plus bondsmen unrelated by blood but who have sworn fealty to the clan. With its code of honor among villains and its family structure, the idea of the Mafia  resonates with hardcore  rap partly because of the way it maps onto the street realities of gangs and turf wars.  But it's also because the idea of family offers a kind of unity that seems more tangible and grounded than allegiance either to the abstract, remote and problematic entity known as the United States of America, or any of the various forms of African-American nationalism. In rap, patriotism contracts to the compact and plausible dimensions of a clique, and usually one tied to a place---a project (like Cash Money's Magnolia neighbourhood in New Orleans), a borough, or at its most expansive, a city. As well being expressed territorially, loyalty is increasingly registered in quasi-genetic imagery--the family, the clan, the dynasty. [DMX would start a label called Bloodline Records]

The cinematic representation of Mafia history in films like The Godfather and Goodfellas often involves an ultimately fatal tension between family loyalty and business logic, as Medieval values imported from Sicily collide with American capitalism.  Clan elders are disrespected, bad blood sets brother against brother, rival families feud and go to war,  because conflicts arise over the new market opportunities represented by  drugs. In rap too there's a tension between the rhetoric of "til death do us part" fealty and the provisional, contractual reality of business relationships. Although The Lox were originally members of the Ruff Ryders milieu, the trio eagerly became henchmen of Puff Daddy, who signed the group to his Bad Boy label, altered their name (originally the Warlocks), persuaded them to tone down their hardcore street style, and coached them in writing radio-friendly songs. But when their debut album for Bad Boy failed to make them rich, the Lox defected, re-plighting their troth to Ruff Ryders, and releasing the  ghettocentric We Are The Streets this January. Other examples of rappers shifting allegiances between different labels/cliques include ex-Death Row artist Snoop Dogg signing on as a No Limit soldier and Eve originally being a protege of Dr. Dre's Aftermath label before affiliating to Ruff Ryders. All this suggests that rap operates less like feuding clans and more like another lucrative entertainment industry based around symbolic warfare, sports--where top players are hired guns and transfer their loyalties at the drop of a check.

Still, for some at least, the thick-like-blood rhetoric is for real. DMX, in particular, regards loyalty as a transcendent value. In a hyper-capitalistic world where market forces tear asunder all forms of solidarity and everybody has their price , he claims: "They do it for the dough/Me I do it for the love". In a skit on his third chart-topping album ... And Then There Was X, an unidentified hanger-on declares he'll do anything to get the money he desperately needs. DMX issues a stern reprimand: "Dog, you got to think about loyalty first, know wha' I'm saying? You got loyalty, money will come.  You got a lot to learn."

LETTER FROM NYC: BUM RAP, column
Melody Maker, January 30th 1993

By Simon Reynolds

Alternative rockers from the Chili Peppers to Sonic
Youth rallied eagerly to MTV's "Rock The Vote" crusade:
underneath the urgency with which they exhorted kids to
register, you could clearly read the message "VOTE CLINTON".
But rappers were conspicuous by their abstention. Ice T
couldn't be bothered to express a preference between the
candidates, while post-election, an underwhelmed Ice Cube
declared that now he was looking forward to getting "Clinton
out of the White House."

You could hardly blame the hip hop community for feeling
uninvolved. Clinton went out of his way to placate white
fears, with his strategic masterstroke of dissing Sister
Souljah, his cold shouldering of black leaders like Jesse
Jackson, and his often-aired plan to put 100,000 more cops on
the streets. Of course, you could hardly blame Clinton for
doing what he had to do to lure the Reagan Democrats (the
white, worried middle class) back into the fold. This was
politics as usual, and a lot of Black Americans gritted their
teeth and accepted it.

What was truly unnerving and despicable was the deafening
silence maintained by all the candidates concerning the LA
riots. In the Middle Ages, popular revolt functioned as a
form of petition. Rioters knew that the uprising would be
quelled, but they also knew the King would pay attention and
make an effort to alleviate their woes. But the LA riots
failed to elicit such a response from the political classes,
bar some woffle about creating 'enterprise zones' to
encourage business to move into the destitute inner cities.

So what do you do if you're black, from the ghetto, and
the most virulent and visible explosion of your pain and fury
has been swept under the carpet? The rap equivalent of
rioting is songs like Ice T's "Cop Killer" and Paris' "Bush
Killa": unconstructive, if perfectly justifiable, expressions
of rage, symbolic and ultimately sterile. These songs remind
me of Morrissey's petulant fantasy "Margaret On The
Guillotine", written at Thatcherism's zenith, when it seemed
the "good folk" were outnumbered by the loadsamoney majority.
The problem with the "killa" songs is that rage is vented
in the instantly gratifying fantasy of revenge, rather than
channelled into politics (which takes a lot longer to get
results).

In the pilot issue of Vibe, a new rap culture
mag, Greg Tate agonises over whether hardcore rap is just a
"momentary containment of [black anger] or worse, an
entertaining displacement?" For Tate, rap's problem is that
it's "agenda-less. It reacts better than it proposes."
Despite hip hop's astonishing cultural victory (its
permeation of US society from advertising to fashion), it's
yet to prove itself as "a harbinger of the black revolution".

In truth, hip hop is going through a bit of a
slack, directionless phase, and its problems are aesthetic as
much as political. Public Enemy's music has gotten mighty
tired: maybe Chuck D's recent pilgrimage to Africa will
rejuvenate, although the black Clash might end up recording a
Sandinista style turkey. The only sonic innovators around
are Cypress Hill, with their Hispanic-flavored, 'blunted'
vibe (a blunt is a special kind of joint), and Arrested
Development, who were last year's De La Soul, i.e.
bourgeois-turned-bohemian art-rap. And the only really
magnetic characters are Treach from Naughty by Nature and Ice
Cube, whose charisma and intelligence sustains their solid
but unimaginative music. The rest of rap is awful samey,
from butt-fixated crossovers like Mixalot's "Baby's Got Back"
and WrecksN'Effect's "Rump Shaker", to the underground's
unremarkable variations on the same old gangsta/B-boy themes.

Apart from the braggart bitch-dissing, hardcore rap's
main message is it's own refusal to cross over. This
fretting over "authenticity", which is partly an anxiety to
keep whites (as consumers and performers) out, has had a
inhibiting effect on the music. The retreat to old school
purism means every record revolves around the same formula: a
mid-pace funky beat, "phat" bassline, and looped samples
(usually jazzy horn-squawks or Hammond ripples). The
"authenticity" school of thought is articulated by the rap
magazine The Source (its name connotes roots, heritage). If
only the highbrow detachment of Vibe* could be combined with
the fanzine-like street-level patriotism of The Source, then
hip hop would have a magazine that could set challenges for
the music rather than follow in its wake. Rap sorely needs
such an injection of impetus.



* no really that's what Vibe was like in those days! Greg Tate was a regular contributor and not that out of step with/further out than the rest of the contents.